Gates: Iraq war premise 'not valid'

During surprise trip to American base, US defence secretary says outcome of the war will remain 'clouded'.

Barack Obama said at Fort Bliss that his address to the nation should not be taken as "victory lap" [AFP]

A few hours after Barack Obama, the US president, declared it is "time to turn the page" on the American-led war in Iraq, Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, said the effort there had been based on flawed premises.

"The problem with this war, I think, for many Americans, is that the premise on which we justified going to war turned out not to be valid," Gates told US soldiers and reporters during an unannounced visit Wednesday to Camp Ramadi in Iraq. "Even if the outcome is a good one from the standpoint of the United States, it'll always be clouded by how it began".

Gates was responding to a questioner who asked if the war had been "worth it".

Obama declared an end to the war Tuesday night during a nationally televised address from the Oval Office - only the second of his term - and told Americans that restoring the America's sagging economy was now "our central mission as a people".

Obama, who inherited the war from his predecessor, George Bush, and is fighting another in Afghanistan, said he had fulfilled a 2008 campaign promise to end US combat operations in Iraq.

He said it was now "time to turn the page" after seven years of bloodshed, sacrifices on both sides and the use of vast resources from tight budgets.

Al Jazeera's Mike Hanna, reporting from Baghdad, said US optimism contradicts the lack of progress on the ground.

"Anybody [in Iraq] who wanted to watch that speech live on television would not be able to do so in most of the cases, simply because there is no electricity," he said.

"There is very little water in many areas, there's very little access to healthcare - so this is the situation within Iraq at present, at the very moment that the US president is saying that it is now capable of governing itself."

Continuing stalemate

President Bush launched the war in 2003 over suspicions that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons were never found.